THE WAY OF ALL FLESH
Mysteriously consoling, the sprite speaks to the
grieving Ferdinand:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange . . .
Here in the sea the rotting corpse of the king is
transmuted bit by bit into priceless treasure. And
what we admire in this is the effortless power, the
wonderful richness of imagination, the " imagina-
tion complete " which Taine praises in the incom-
parable poet.
To my knowledge, no biographer or commentator
has yet compared this beautiful song with Hamlet's
meditations in the graveyard scene, thoughts that
are in direct contradiction to Ariel's. Earlier in
the play Hamlet has already spoken of the fate of the
dead. The king asks him where is the corpse of the
murdered Polonius ? " At supper," is Hamlet's reply.
And he adds, " Not where he eats, but where he is
eaten: ... we fat all creatures else to fat us, and
we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and
your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes,
but to one table: that's the end." Pursuing this no-
tion, Hamlet's imagination leads him to the thought
that "a man may fish with the worm that hath eat of
a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that
worm." He wishes to show " how a king may go a
progress through the guts of a beggar."
In this conversation between the king and Ham-
let, what does it matter where the body of Polonius
lies ? If he is not found within a month, the dead
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